Casos fundamentales en el estudio neuropsicológico de la psicopatía

It is time to return to Mrs. Dalloway. You will recall how Mrs. Dalloway becomes aware of the trajectory of her own life; how she witnesses her own disappearance as she walks up Bond Street. Getting married, having children become not only things she has done, things she has accomplished, but how she loses herself along the way; how she ceases to be Clarissa, with so many possibilities in front of her. Marrying, having children now: these are not only punctuation points, they are also moments of ceremony; what women do in order to be happy. Mrs. Dalloway does not feel happy. She might not know how she feels;

she might not reveal her feelings to herself or to others; but she does not feel happy. She becomes alienated from her own life, conscious of possibilities only after they have been given up, possibilities that shimmer like the old friends she remembers in the passage of her day.

Feminism is full of stories like this: of women who are not made happy by what is supposed to make them happy. This is not to say unhappiness is everywhere, but rather that the expectation of happiness, the expectation that women should smile and the world will smile with them, is what puts so much on hold; a life on hold. The expectation of happiness does not necessarily create unhappiness but it might make unhappiness harder to bear. In the late twentieth century, feminist sociologists such as Ann Oakley wrote at length about how the expectation that in becoming mothers women will become happy worked to pathologize unhappiness. She describes “post-natal depression” as “a pseudo-scientific tag for the description and ideological transformation of maternal discontent” (1980, 277). The romantic myths of

childbirth as maternal bliss make maternal blues a social as well as biological problem.

This early feminist work emphasized the importance of women telling their own stories that dislodged the happiness myth, stories that are not simply about unhappiness but about the complex, ambivalent, and messy feelings that women have. There are stories of women workers too, for example, in Arlie Hochschild’s ([1983] 2003) The Managed Heart, women who have to smile as their job, who are as alienated from their smiles as factory workers would be from their arms, when those arms are given in service to the industrial machine. I return to the question of labor (and arms) in chapter 3. Here I want to explore how happiness is what you can be required to perform in private as well as public spaces. I am sure many girls and women have heard comments like “Smile, love, it could be worse” when they walk out and about without cheerfulness planted on their faces. Smiling becomes a feminine achievement. But smiling can also be what you have to do to compensate when you are perceived as not feminine enough. You might have to soften your appearance because (or when) you are perceived as too hard. A black woman or woman of color might have to smile all the more because she is perceived as angry or too assertive: smiling then becomes what you have to do in order to dislodge an expectation.

Expectations can be confirmed by the very effort to dislodge them. Even a smile can be too assertive if you are already judged as being assertive.

Happiness as a form of emotional labor can be condensed in the formula: making others happy by appearing happy. The labor is most successful when you become as happy as you appear; the more you strain, the more your smile would seem strained. Feminism might be what we need to resist this formula.

By this I do not mean that to become feminists is to aim to make others unhappy. Rather you are no longer willing to appear happy, or to become as happy as you appear, in order to make others happy. Feminism might matter at the other end of the formula. By this I mean: you are not made happy by the appearance of happiness. We acquire, as feminist feeling, sympathy for women who are not happy when they are meant to be happy. Feminist sympathy involves a different direction to unhappiness. We would understand unhappiness not as the failure to be happy and thus as causing yet more unhappiness, but a refusal, a claim, a protest, or even just some ordinary thing, a texture of a life being lived. To be sympathetic to unhappiness is often to be perceived as unsympathetic. I think of the film Waitress (dir. Adrienne Shelly, 2007). Jenna, an unhappily married woman, arrives at a doctor’s office and says she is pregnant. The doctor responds sympathetically by offering her his congratulations. His sympathy is not in response to how she does feel (miserable) but rather to how she should feel (happy). She is alienated by his sympathy, even though that sympathy is in accordance with an everyday judgment (that pregnancy for married women is a happy event). The waitress is alienated by virtue of her response to being pregnant, such that to be in sympathy with her response of alienation (to offer your condolence) would be to share her alienation:

“Poor you, stuck with him.” A feminist sympathy is sympathetic to an alienation from happiness.

Affect aliens sympathize with alien affects. We can be alienated by sympathy when sympathy is given in accordance with an expectation of how we should feel rather than how we do feel. I think that is why there has been such an outpouring of feminist sympathy for Mrs. Dalloway’s predicament. Feminism might involve the cultivation of sympathy for women who are unhappy with the situation they find themselves in.

It is interesting that in Clarissa’s case it is not clear what she is unhappy about. For Clarissa the rather uncanny sensation of becoming Mrs. Dalloway as a loss of possibility, as an unbecoming, or becoming nothing at all, does not enter her consciousness in the form of sadness about something. The sadness of this book—and for me it is a sad book—is not presented as a point of view. Mrs. Dalloway does not explain the causes of her grief. She is too busy getting ready for her party. So much sadness revealed in the need to be busy. So much grief expressed in the need not to be overwhelmed by grief.

And it is at the party that Mrs. Dalloway is put in touch with grief. It is not her grief but the grief of a stranger, somebody she does not know, that takes her away from the party. Lady Bradshaw says to Mrs.

Dalloway, “‘Just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A

young man (that is what Sir William is telling Mr Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army.’

Oh! Thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” (Woolf [1925] 1996, 279). In the middle of the party, words accumulate as a narrative, telling the story of a death, of a suicide, of a man whose suffering was too much to bear. The reader has already been witness to his death as well as his suffering. Clarissa has not witnessed his death, but she imagines it, almost as something happening to herself: “always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt” (280). When she is given the details of his death, his death becomes flesh: “Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with the thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness” (281). The violence of an encounter becomes a violence she encounters. It is not simply that Clarissa is being empathetic, but that at this moment, a death becomes real or material because it has been allowed in. A death spreads as words into worlds. What is striking about Mrs. Dalloway is how suffering enters her consciousness from the edges, through the arrival of another, who is a stranger, an intruder, who has not been invited into the room.

Suffering enters not simply or only as self-consciousness—as a consciousness of one’s own suffering—

but as a heightening of consciousness, a world-consciousness in which the suffering of those who do not belong disturbs the atmosphere.

It is at this point, the point when consciousness becomes worldly, that we open up what it means to consider feminism as an unhappy archive. We would not simply be thinking of unhappiness as a feeling that goes from the inside out; the unhappiness lodged in a figure such as the housewife; nor even as a feeling shared through empathetic witnessing. Rather we would be exploring how we can become more attuned to what is already in the world; to the violence of a world that can be obscured by life’s chatter.

The arrival of suffering from the edges teaches us about the difficulty of becoming conscious of suffering.

It is hard labor to recognize sadness and disappointment when you are living a life that is meant to be happy but is not happy, which is meant to be full but feels empty. It is difficult to give up an idea of one’s life when one has lived one’s life according to that idea. We learn not only that consciousness of unhappiness is achieved but also how such consciousness puts us in touch with the world; allowing a world to pierce a seal, what I call the happiness seal. So much inequality is preserved through the appeal of happiness, the appeal to happiness. It is as if the response to power and violence is or should be simply to adjust or modify how we feel; for instance, by transforming a social relation of exploitation into a personal feeling of empowerment.

Feminism: how we break through a happiness seal. Even when unhappiness is a familiar feeling, it can arrive like a stranger, to pierce the stillness with the “thud, thud, thud” of violence. In the case of Mrs.

Dalloway, it is a stranger who disturbs the familiar. But she still has something to do with it. Maybe, just maybe that is why this day matters so much: she was getting ready, to allow her past to flicker with life;

she was getting ready to be undone. A seal is broken through a combination of forces. And so, in the middle of her party, something other than happiness happens. If a stranger disturbs the familiar, being a stranger can become familiar. I will return to experiences of being a stranger in chapter 5. Just note that when you recognize yourself as the stranger, you become estranged not only from happiness but from yourself. You might be the one whose arrival causes a disturbance. What then is disturbed? Audre Lorde, who offered us one of the most powerful feminist critiques of happiness (I will turn directly to her critique in my killjoy survival kit), shows how the past can be what is disturbed:

Tensions on the street were high, as they always are in racially mixed zones of transition. As a very little girl, I remember shrinking from a particular sound, a hoarsely sharp, guttural rasp, because it often meant a nasty glob of grey spittle upon my coat or shoe an instant later. My mother wiped it off with the little pieces of newspaper she always carried in her purse. Sometimes she fussed about low-class people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter where

they went, impressing upon me that this humiliation was totally random. It never occurred to me to doubt her. It was not until years later once in conversation I said to her: “Have you noticed people don’t spit into the wind so much the way they used to?” And the look on my mother’s face told me that I had blundered into one of those secret places of pain that must never be spoken of again. But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else. (1984b, 17–18)

To remember violence is to bring the sound of violence into the present, that “hoarsely, sharp, guttural rasp.” But a memory can obscure the violence brought up. For Audre Lorde’s mother cannot bear to speak of racism, and creates an impression that the violence directed toward her black child is random. When the child reminds her mother about what happened, or what she thought used to happen because that was what she was told used to happen, when she brings it up in conversation, she has ventured into “one of those secret places of pain.” When violence is no longer dismissible as random, violence is witnessed as directed: toward a black body, for Audre Lorde, toward her own black body, shrinking from its sound.

Some forms of taking cover from pain are meant to protect those we love from being hurt. That cover still fails. When the cover fails, racism is revealed. Another way of saying this: the past can be what is sealed.

When the seal has been broken; pain floods in.

To reflect on how we take cover from pain is to return with a different handle to the question of consciousness explored in chapter 1. We are learning how we learn not to be conscious of what happens right in front of us. Even when something happens to us, an event that is traumatic, we are not witnessing what is happening because of the handle we are given to make sense of it. We could use the term “false consciousness” to describe this process of taking cover. False consciousness here would not refer to something an individual suffers from: as if she herself screens out what gets in the way of her own happiness. Rather we would use this term to show how there is something false about our consciousness of the world. We can thus inherit false consciousness. Feminist consciousness can be thought of as consciousness of the violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility. You can venture into the secret places of pain by recalling something. You can cause unhappiness by noticing something.

And if you can cause unhappiness by noticing something, you realize that the world you are in is not the world you thought you were in.